If you just want the cheapest grid possible (regardless of emissions), renewables paired with gas is the cheapest. There are some exceptions to this, places like cloudy Seattle don’t make for good solar farms, which drives up the effective cost of solar significantly.
If you are shooting for a carbon-free grid, nuclear is notably cheaper than renewables paired with grid-scale storage. Notably, much of the nuclear cost is bureaucracy that keeps the plants in limbo for decades and are quite good at making this carbon-free power source unnaturally expensive. This bureaucracy can be brought to a reasonable level if there is political will.
They do and they don’t. They don’t because they’re machines the size of buildings, but they do because most of their construction is just standard plumbing. Except the reactor itself, of course.
It’s pretty similar to shipbuilding. You can have a bunch of mass-produced components, even enormous components like shipping container engines, but the hull and superstructure still get made from scratch each time. And not just because of their size, but because each ship is going to be slightly custom, because it needs to fit a certain size envelope, or needs to deal with certain cargos or environmental conditions.
Similarly, a reactor needs to be built to fit the site, in terms of plain old footprint, but also for geology, water access (if using a river for cooling), and to be protected from storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other local disasters.
If you just want the cheapest grid possible (regardless of emissions), renewables paired with gas is the cheapest. There are some exceptions to this, places like cloudy Seattle don’t make for good solar farms, which drives up the effective cost of solar significantly.
If you are shooting for a carbon-free grid, nuclear is notably cheaper than renewables paired with grid-scale storage. Notably, much of the nuclear cost is bureaucracy that keeps the plants in limbo for decades and are quite good at making this carbon-free power source unnaturally expensive. This bureaucracy can be brought to a reasonable level if there is political will.
Nuclear power plants also don’t have standardized parts afaik, driving up costs.
They do and they don’t. They don’t because they’re machines the size of buildings, but they do because most of their construction is just standard plumbing. Except the reactor itself, of course.
It’s pretty similar to shipbuilding. You can have a bunch of mass-produced components, even enormous components like shipping container engines, but the hull and superstructure still get made from scratch each time. And not just because of their size, but because each ship is going to be slightly custom, because it needs to fit a certain size envelope, or needs to deal with certain cargos or environmental conditions.
Similarly, a reactor needs to be built to fit the site, in terms of plain old footprint, but also for geology, water access (if using a river for cooling), and to be protected from storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other local disasters.
That’s simply an issue of not building enough of them.
Yes that’s my point